


October 11th

by Mishiman



Category: Persona 5, Persona Series
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Language of Flowers, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Polythieves (Persona 5), Post-Canon, bad dad sads
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-25 18:04:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17126159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mishiman/pseuds/Mishiman
Summary: It's hard, but you don't have to do it alone.





	October 11th

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yormgen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yormgen/gifts).



> Merry Christmas [yormgen!](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yormgen)

Haru woke in stages, slowly, like a leaf lifted on a lazy updraft.

 

She stretched her legs, humming sleepily, and shifted enough in her bed to be reminded that no one had joined her last night. A shame, but that was just how it had to be sometimes. Yusuke might have spent the night in Ryuji's room, or vice versa, or perhaps they had each slept alone, as she had. Her bed was large and comfortable in any position but she still took the opportunity to spreadeagle on her belly, listening to her back crackle as she made herself as large as she could and smiling to herself for no particular reason.

 

Her alarm went off, and after she silenced it, her voice assistant greeted her and told her the date. Her smile faded.

 

The automated voice continued, listing her day's reminders, but her attention had wandered. She silenced it and sat in the dark.

 

Three minutes. She could spare three minutes. She allocated three minutes to feeling... whatever it was she felt. A pressure in her chest, too large to let out or put words to. The longer she allowed it to occupy her, the more suffocated she felt, as if the feeling might choke her if she let it. So she put it back in its place again, carefully tucked away, and turned on the light so she could get dressed.

 

It had been several years since she'd graduated high school, but she had to admit she still favoured much the same palette. Her wardrobe still contained a healthy amount of soft pink, lilac and seafoam. Some yellow, some cream and off-white. But she slid those hangers aside and reached into the far side of her closet.

 

At first, she'd gone along to get along at Okumura Foods. It had been her strategy to build trust among the employees, rather than tearing the company down and starting from scratch. She'd relied on her staff to tell her how things were done and had kept her head down as she learned the ropes, and part of that was learning to blend in.

 

Top to bottom, from the highest executive to the lowliest mailroom clerk, the employees at Okumura Foods dressed in staid neutrals. Black suits and white shirts. Grey slacks, navy blouses. The female employees could get away with a little more colour, but even they kept to only the most muted tones, as though a bright colour might draw too much attention.

 

As the months went by, she'd begun to get her feet under her, and the way her father had treated his employees before his death had become harder and harder to set aside. Once she reached the age of majority and took control in full, she began to make a few changes at the company.

 

It didn't have the same visceral satisfaction of donning a mask and gutting her foes in the Metaverse, but it was still a rebellion. After her father's death, the company had changed its overtime policies, on paper at least, but much of it was only for the look of the thing.

 

Enforcement was lax. So she'd felt out her staff, sought advice from those she trusted, and restructured. That was the term for it. She'd soon realized how much the corporate world loved its jargon, so she'd adopted it wholeheartedly and used it as her shield.

 

She hadn't been cruel about it. It wasn't in her to be cruel. But she'd found she had a very good memory for which employees took to the new direction the company was taking and which remained loyal to the old ways. A few reprimands, delivered with every pleasantry she could muster, were all she offered before she - ha - brought down the axe.

 

Restructuring was a useful term for it. It was blameless. Their stock was down after the company's labour violations under her father had come to light, so of course restructuring was needed. It was the way of things. The fact that quite a lot of the restructuring had been at the top rather than the middle or lower reaches of the company did not escape notice, and the papers had blared unflattering headlines, as she'd known they would. Let them. It hadn't mattered. In a few months' time, after the first wave of restructuring, there were quite a few new faces around the boardroom meeting table. In ripples, small at first but growing larger, things began to change.

 

She led by example, of course, as a good leader should. When there was so much that still needed to be done, it was tempting to work through her lunch and coffee breaks, but she didn't. She ate her sensible, healthy meals in her office, or visited the vending machines when she needed a pick me up, just as the other employees did. She watched the managers like a hawk, and, seeing her do it, they enforced regular breaks and cut back on the overtime requests; her next step was to watch them with more subtlety, and this time, if they showed signs of returning to the old ways, there were no more reprimands as warning. She could be kind, but for this, she chose not to be. The second wave of restructuring had been larger than the first but easier to manage. The holes in the chain of command left behind by the fired managers - her father's people, she'd begun to call them in her mind - had been simple enough to fill by promoting from within. There'd been hiccups, of course, as the company went through its adjustment period, and the papers had blared about that too. But things had begun to right themselves surprisingly quickly, and after a little positive press thanks to a reporter friend of Akira's, Okumura Foods' stock climbed again.

 

Many of the changes had been hard to see at first, unless you knew where to look, and they weren't quantifiable with numbers. But you could see it on the employees' faces, and, more noticeably, in the way they dressed.

 

Relaxing the dress code from business formal to business casual had not helped one iota, because the old workplace culture had been so unforgiving, so again, she'd led by example. Her black skirt and jacket had been replaced with grey tweed slacks and blouses in progressively lighter and brighter colours, as though she had to introduce colour with care lest she shock the system. And it seemed to be true, to some extent. She _had_ heard mutterings from the upper tiers of management, from men and women alike. Professionalism. Tradition.

 

One day, in the summer, she'd worn a tailored mauve sleeveless top with an asymmetrical neckline, a choice that flattered her complexion and showed off her toned upper arms nicely, and that had seemed to be the last straw for a few of the old guard. Her father's people, of course. Visible shoulders seemed to be a particular insult for whatever reason. But one long email chain later, started by one of the brand managers in the most simpering of tones and ended with sullen apologies, and the new dress code was not only rewritten but also encouraged. She'd taken it upon herself to write an undeniably professional but irrepressibly sunny email and sent it company-wide. Thousands of employees were encouraged by the CEO herself to show their summer colours, as she'd put it, and she'd finally started seeing some brightness outside her own office.

 

There were pinks and aquas in the elevator up to her office in the morning, soft yellows and even reds, and she'd taken quiet pleasure in complimenting the women who had been brave enough to come in to work that day wearing a colour outside the neutral palette. Something that might have been considered too daring for many corporate offices, let alone Okumura Foods. Where did you get it? It suits you. Small moments of civility that were as much for her as they were for them.

 

But today was not a day for her coral blouse, or her slate blue turtleneck with the bell sleeves. Today was a day for black.

 

In years past, on this date, she'd considered breaking this unspoken rule, too. In fact she fantasized about it still. The look on their faces if she arrived to work without a speck of black on her! But she left the fantasy where it was, in the back of her mind, and resigned herself to reality. Sometimes it was better to pick your battles.

 

Suitably restrained in a subdued pantsuit, head to toe in coal black with only her white high collared blouse beneath it to offer the eye any reprieve, she finally opened her bedroom door and headed to the kitchen.

 

Near spotless, as usual. Ryuji and Yusuke were both the tidy sort, as was she, and the cleaning service they hired to maintain the place once a week never had all that much to do beyond a surface clean. A cup in the sink containing a few drops of tea - never coffee; that hadn't changed - was the only sign that Ryuji had already come and gone.

 

She smiled at the thought of him. It had taken him a few years post-graduation to find his footing, filling the time with one directionless attempt after another, but he'd gotten there in the end. He'd been working at Leblanc with Akira at the time, a job that she'd known he hadn't hated but hadn't really loved, either, when he'd decided to try baking his mother a cake for her birthday on a whim instead of buying it.

 

The result had been terrible, both too salty and too sweet and somehow bland, too, but Ryuji had been hooked. He'd had to buy more ingredients, of course, and the second cake came out much better. It certainly would have been suitable for a birthday cake. But it wasn't perfect, so he'd gone back to the store, picking out the same ingredients and a few more, too, going well off-recipe, and the third cake was something all to itself. Simple but delicious, and sort of pretty, too, with strawberries and blueberries on top. He'd shared the second cake with her and Yusuke, and the way his face had lit up as they ate it together after dinner had told her all she needed to know.

 

He'd tried to explain it to her a few times in the years since. It wasn't that he liked sweets. Far from it. That hadn't changed, either - he'd kept fit and, when he did indulge in something less than health conscious, it was usually something fatty and salty, not something sweet.

 

And it wasn't that he hadn't enjoyed working with Akira. Akira ran Leblanc as though he'd done it all his life, and Ryuji had liked manning the till and serving customers well enough. Akira handled the curry, claiming that Sojiro, now more or less retired, would somehow be informed telepathically if anyone but Akira attempted his secret recipe. But Ryuji had prepped the ingredients, and kept the place clean, and was good with the customers. She could tell when she'd visited them both at Leblanc that he hadn't been unhappy. But it wasn't fulfilling for him like it was for Akira.

 

Ryuji liked the challenge of baking, though, he said. It seemed easy - anyone could make a cake from a box - and it _was_ easy to make something passable. But mastering it was much harder.

 

It was usually at this point that Ryuji would go on at length about the elasticity of gluten proteins, if she let him. Or the way that salt stabilized yeast in a loaf of bread, distributing the carbon dioxide evenly so that the bread would have the ideal texture. From her understanding, he'd never taken to schoolwork, and had scraped by and graduated thanks to his friends' study sessions. But when it was a topic that interested him, he dug into it with a passion.

 

She loved his passion. She loved watching him talk about his craft, even if she couldn't claim to follow all of it. And getting to play taste tester wasn't so bad, either. He didn't care for sweets, after all, and Yusuke's food preferences meant that he wasn't the best judge, but _she_ had a taste for sweets, and Ryuji often relied on her to course correct his dessert and pastry recipes.

 

It wasn't just the challenge, and it wasn't just the ownership she could tell he felt when he'd begun coming up with new recipe variations of his own - not so different from how she thought Akira must have felt when he'd taken the reins at Leblanc and begun making his own little tweaks to how things were done. It was also the spirit behind the birthday cake for his mother. It was one of the ways Ryuji showed care.

 

She smiled to herself as she prepared herself a cup of coffee, her thoughts still focused on the past.

 

She'd felt such _satisfaction_ when she'd come up with a way to help him turn his hobby into a profession. A key turning in a lock. It was a little like her gardening, or the new dress code. She set the stage, but it was up to her vegetables, or her employees, or Ryuji, to rise to the occasion and flourish. And he had.

 

She liked to picture him in his test bakery, filled with industrial sized ovens and wheeled racks taller than he was. Covered in flour and kneading a small batch of bread on one of the marble work surfaces, or pouring ingredients by the sackful into one of the enormous mixing vats to make sure that the recipe scaled up properly.

 

At first he'd protested, of course. It was too much for him. He didn't need all this fancy equipment. He could come up with new recipes at home, he'd said, and it was true that their kitchen was spacious and better equipped than most. It had taken quite a lot of gentle chiding on her part and assurances from Yusuke to convince him to accept both the position and all that came with it. In the end, it was Yusuke who had managed to change his mind. An artist could work in the most meagre conditions, with children's paints and his bare hands, he'd said, or an artist could work with the best tools that money could buy. Which did Ryuji think would garner the best results?

 

Put like that, Ryuji couldn't argue any longer. He'd taken the position and the two baking assistants that came with it, and knowing that he came home every day tired but happy - _fulfilled_ \- gave her such a thrill that she almost felt a little guilty. Almost.

 

Now Ryuji's baked goods could be found in every one of Okumura Foods' line of cafes, and they were popular enough that he'd begun to branch out a little with weird shit, as he called it. Limited edition treats, as they were called in the cafes. The main attractions were still his _anpan_ and cornets, or the more Western croissants and brownies, but the persimmon custards and the salted fig caramel tarts had their own cult following online.

 

When he was feeling puckish he liked to visit the food forums that obsessively followed the seasonal trends in Tokyo and drop a few hints under an anonymous handle. At times the hints were factual, and other times they weren't, but the feverish debate that sprung up around the idea of whether the Okumura cafes would _really_ release a sweet tomato danish next month tickled him.

 

Sometimes - not often, just once in a blue moon - Ryuji even had the time to make a little something for Leblanc, typically some kind of cookie that he deemed to be too simple for the Okumura cafes. If these cookies were, in fact, an excuse to visit Akira and blow off work for half a day, Haru turned a blind eye to it. Technically these cookies should have been Okumura Foods property, given that they were made on Okumura Foods premises with Okumura Foods ingredients, and technically he and his two assistants were being paid handsomely to socialize with an old friend and to go home early, respectively, but Ryuji and his staff worked hard, and if it made them happy to feel like they were getting away with something, she didn't begrudge them a half day off the books a few times a year.

 

She lifted the lid of the container on the counter, where Ryuji stashed the rejects from the test bakery. The uglies, he called them. A cakey muffin that Ryuji would never eat himself, except in tiny fragments to test for work, called her name, and she sank her teeth into it with pleasure, chasing bites of it with her perfect cup of coffee. The muffin was a little undersized, and a little lopsided, too - not quite suitable for sale in an Okumura cafe - but it tasted none the worse for it.

 

She checked her watch and decided there wasn't time to pay Yusuke a visit. Too bad. She liked peeking over his shoulder in his home studio, true, but even more than that, she liked waking him up. He was a light sleeper and always heard her enter his room, and the small, simple smile he wore as he opened his eyes was a welcome sight on the rare morning she dreaded going in to work, like this one.

 

His schedule followed rules that she couldn't understand, pingponging from late nights and late mornings to being in bed by nine so that he could capture the light of dawn the next morning. His words, not hers. They lived in a nice part of Setagaya, certainly, but it was still within Tokyo, and the grey light that filtered through the buildings at this time of the year must have had some quality that she was unaware of. It definitely wasn't bright enough to paint by, even in his airy, window-filled studio. But quibbling over details with Yusuke was a pointless endeavour when it came to art, and at this point she and Ryuji had grown used to shrugging at each other over his artist's capriciousness.

 

She sighed. The time for woolgathering was over. She cleaned up her crumbs and finished getting ready for work, applying her makeup in the most understated tones and putting her curls into place. Her driver was already waiting for her outside, so she slipped her shoes and coat on. She left her pleasant memories inside the home where she'd made them and closed the door on them.

 

It was always like this. Her memories of Ryuji and Yusuke and their comfortable life together were her strength in hard times, but it was difficult to bring them to work with her. Something about sitting in the backseat behind her driver reminded her of other memories, ones she was less fond of. In no time at all she was climbing the stone steps to the chrome and glass entryway of Okumura Foods, where her father's face struck her like a slap.

 

She always managed to forget this part. It took her by surprise every single year.

 

At least the floral arrangement surrounding his portrait in the reception area was more restrained this year. Tasteful. The first time, less than a year after she'd turned twenty and had taken full control of the company but, conspicuously, two years after his death, the memorial arrangement had sprawled from one side of the room to the other, each executive throwing more money at her than the last in an ostentatious display to curry favour. She'd felt their eyes on her back, so she had silently gone through the condolence cards displayed beneath each one, queasy with barely contained fury.

 

How dare they? How dare they use this day to try to climb another rung on the ladder? And even aside from the the fact that flowers were traditional for memorials, she knew they knew she liked flowers. Before his death, some of her father's people had wormed their way into her life at home, far enough to know the most surface level facets of her personality, at least, and she was certain that that bit of information had been used as currency itself. Passed around from one to another, traded for other scraps of intel. Anything to get ahead.

 

She'd clasped her hands in front of her so that she wouldn't be tempted to leave them hanging at her sides in fists, moving through the flowers and condolence cards a little faster.

 

The Vice President of Manufacturing had contributed a pine spray and lily arrangement. An analyst had chosen white roses. The Chief Financial Officer had spent hundreds of thousands of yen, she was sure of it, on a brutally overpowering stretch of yellow carnations. She'd needed to focus on her breathing when she came to that part of the arrangement, pulling in slow, steadying breaths as the symbolism of it sunk in. She certainly didn't have every single flower's meaning memorized, but this one was simple enough to recall.

 

Did he truly mean the message that such flowers sent? Carnations weren't out of the ordinary for a memorial arrangement, but _yellow_ carnations signified that the recipient had failed the giver in some way. They signified disappointment, or disdain. Had the CFO of Okumura Foods truly intended to give _yellow carnations_ on the anniversary of her father's death?

 

And were they given to her father to indicate that he had failed the company? Or were they given to her, to indicate that she was already doing the same?

 

He'd been standing there, of course, right there, off to the side with the other executives. The ones who had wasted their money on mere condolences instead of thinly veiled passive aggressive insults. One look at his face had been enough to tell her that he'd known full well what he was conveying with his yellow carnations.

 

On that anniversary of her father's death, during her first year fully at the helm of the company, she'd kept her temper until she was safely ensconced within the walls of her office. She'd cancelled every meeting and had ordered her assistant to forestall any interruptions, no matter how important.

 

Then she had spent the entire morning drafting an email, addressed to all staff. It had begun with insults, some clever and others not subtle whatsoever, and as she'd typed them out her anger had faded, as it always did. She could never keep the fire going for long. She'd gone through draft after draft, deleting and adjusting and refining, and by the time she'd finished, she had a very professional, very _corporate_ email. It had stated that while the floral arrangements honouring Kunikazu Okumura were deeply appreciated, Okumura Foods would prefer that, in lieu of flowers, employees who wished to show their respects send their donations to a charity for the underprivileged in Tokyo.

 

She changed the charity every year and matched the donations with her own money - or, more accurately, she matched them with the inheritance money that steadily accumulated in an account she kept separate from both her own finances, fed by her Okumura Foods paycheques, and the company's finances, handled by a small army of accountants. As for the executives' donations, it pleased her to think that the money that had once been wasted on unwelcome flowers - kissass money was what Ryuji called it - was now being used to help the poor, and if that was the last thing her father would have wanted, there wasn't an employee in all of Okumura Foods who was brave enough to say it.

 

She gave to youth legal defense funds, thinking of what might have happened to Akira had he not had a prosecutor like Sae Niijima on his side. She gave to women's shelters, thinking of what Ryuji had told her about his and his mother's past. She gave to groups that fed hungry children, thinking of how Yusuke had grown up.

 

She gave to a watchdog organization that kept an eye on the foster home system, above and beyond the paltry checks the government made, though she tried not to think of Akechi and his upbringing unless she had to.

 

Today, she'd walked past the much more tasteful memorial display in the reception area on autopilot, lost in thought, and now she found herself in the elevator with a mid level employee she didn't know. He was working his way through the necessaries, the I'm so sorry for your losses and deferential head bowing that she knew couldn't be avoided. They each endured it until he had to take a breath, and then she seized her chance to change the subject, talking about the weather with such relief that she could tell he was confused by her tone and smile. That was fine. She'd have to hear it all again from just about every person she'd encounter all day, some of it genuine and some of it not, so she might as well smile while she could.

 

The day crawled. Each year, on this date, she considered the idea of staying at home a little more seriously. Who could begrudge her her day of mourning? No one would, at least not out in the open. But she knew how her father's people comported themselves very well. They'd insinuate that she was weak, or, more subtly, they'd take this day as an invitation to reminisce about better times, when the company had been run differently indeed. Of course, they probably did that anyway, amongst themselves, regardless of what day it was.

 

Oh well. It couldn't be helped. Sitting at her desk in her office, she tried to bury herself in her work, though she was only somewhat successful, given that she didn't really have any. Her assistant knew the drill for this day of the year by now and left her alone, having already scheduled her meetings and paperwork due dates to fall on future Haru's head. She considered breaking her self-imposed silence to beg her assistant for busywork, but if she was honest with herself, she couldn't picture herself being able to focus for long. Usually her work ethic was near impeccable, but this once, she let her iron discipline crumble.

 

She wasn't getting any work done, so she decided to text Yusuke so he couldn't get any done either.

 

His latest painting was coming along, he said. That was the phrase he always used. Coming along meant that it hadn't thrown any wrenches his way, and wasn't necessarily an indicator for his opinion of its overall progress or quality. In fact, coming along simply seemed to mean that he had applied paint to it sometime in the last several days. When she visited his studio, there were usually no less than four canvases leaning against the wall at a time, each getting a turn on the easel for what could be hours or merely for a few brushstrokes. She couldn't have guessed how close any of them were to completion because, in her admittedly inexpert opinion, they all could have been finished, or none of them. His work was hard to gauge.

 

She smiled, zooming in to see all the details of the photos he'd sent her. So far as she could tell, they were closeups from several different paintings. A few more for his dream series, then, an ever expanding group of work that he'd been exploring for a few years now. She and Ryuji had gone to his exhibits and tried to puzzle out his artist statements together, but the most they'd been able to agree on was that some of these paintings had to do with actual dreams and some had to do with the less literal sense of the word. A shape on the horizon to strive towards, she'd suggested. A guy ahead of you to get you going faster and faster until you could beat him, Ryuji had agreed.

 

Yusuke's conception of it was always the Sayuri, and when Ryuji had first brought up the idea, she'd have said that that was too obvious and straightforward for Yusuke's art - if she hadn't seen it herself, that is. But he never did paint her directly. He hid her in every painting, true, but only in pieces. The shape that her hair made against the round collar of her dress could be seen in a tree's branches, or the angle of her head and neck might be found in a crowd scene - though he never painted a person who looked anything like the Sayuri. It seemed to amuse him to hide the painting his master had stolen from his mother in his own paintings, as though to reclaim it, or give it new life.

 

The art critics tended to focus on the more straightforward dream imagery in Yusuke's work anyway. His landscapes and interiors had other, transparent images overlaid directly on top. Busy scenes, all of them. People working in a factory, elbow to elbow, some of them overlapping impossibly themselves, as if they had to contort around one another to complete their tasks. Prison cells full of complex shadows and the suggestion of bodies, lying motionless. Towering vaults and file cabinets jumbling crazily in a geometrically impossible way that gave the viewer a vague sense of unease.

 

Now that it was all over, it was fun for her and Ryuji to recall the Metaverse as they looked over Yusuke's paintings hanging in the galleries. Do you remember when you - ? Yeah, that bastard?  He just about did us in, that one time, in his Palace. Remember when - ?

 

The three of them shared a secret the critics didn't know, but it wasn't just the Metaverse. She and Ryuji liked to find themselves in the paintings, too. Are these your arms, or mine? That's definitely your back, there, in the corner. Oho. This one's a good likeness, he'd say, elbowing her and grinning if they came across a rare nude in one painting or another.

 

They weren't his only models, but they were his go-to. Even when they posed for him, he tended to avoid painting their faces, seeming to feel as though that would be letting the public into their private lives, but the rest of them were fair game. So whenever he had a new solo show, she and Ryuji made a game of it, tallying on their fingers who was featured in the most paintings and squabbling goodnaturedly over partial points. Many of Yusuke's paintings, the less realistic ones, separated their bodies into many different shapes - two bent legs fading into an enormous gardenia here; the curve of someone's shoulders and neck painted transparently over a nighttime shoreline there - and it didn't seem fair to assign full points for only half of a body.

 

His paintings were often frightening, or ominous. At least, the critics seemed to think so. And it was true that most of their memories of fighting in the Metaverse should have been unpleasant ones. But time had a way of softening things, and finding themselves in Yusuke's paintings felt more like flipping through a photo album than it did revisiting a nightmare, even if the paintings themselves tended toward some dark subject matter.

 

Yusuke liked to keep things light, though, he'd say, laughing quietly. Not his best, but he did still like puns. His version of keeping things light was to hide a literal light inside his paintings, just as he hid the Sayuri, and Haru and Ryuji. So above the twisted factory workers sailed an improbable moon, dimly lighting the assembly lines. It was enormous and butter yellow, like the one they'd seen in Hawaii, although she hadn't known the two of them at that point. The modern prison cells, stark and full of black pools of shadow, were overlaid with indoor fireworks like the ones they hadn't seen much of that summer, painted so faintly that they were hard to see until you noticed the pattern.

 

The grey bank vaults and file cabinets spilling across the canvas like Escher stairs were covered with the lightest suggestion of geometric shapes in jewel-tone colours, squares and triangles and half-circles, and that painting had stumped her and Ryuji for quite some time. They could have just asked Yusuke what the colours meant, but that would have been admitting defeat, so they'd stood in that gallery for over an hour, analyzing the painting and its meaning until Ryuji had it. The shapes were the colourful panes of glass that made up the lamps from Leblanc, dissected into pieces and scattered over the rest of the painting, of course.

 

Ryuji was always more than half convinced that Yusuke's paintings were meaningless. He admired the way artists could bullshit for pages and pages for their artist statements, he said, but that didn't mean he thought any of it was true. Haru generally thought that Yusuke's paintings represented hope, a light in the darkness, though she had to admit that that was a fairly simple reading for such visually complicated paintings. Yusuke refused to make his artist statements any clearer, though he did give her and Ryuji one piece of insight more than he did the critics and the galleries.

 

They really were his dreams, he said. Old places that had once terrified him, overlaid with old sights that he still loved. Scenes of oppression tangled with traces of those who had saved him, and those whom he had helped save.

 

And sometimes, he finally admitted, when he awoke in the morning, his eyes opened before his mind fully gave up on dreaming. The way he described it to them, the sight of his dreamscape superimposed over his bedroom sounded very much like the technique he used in his paintings over and over.

 

But she'd spent too long losing herself in the collection of closeups of Yusuke's paintings that she kept on her phone. He sent one last text, apologetic, telling her that he wanted to get some more painting in before the sun went behind one of the taller neighbouring buildings, so she reluctantly let him go.

 

She ate up some time with her email, weighing in on topics that, strictly speaking, didn't need her go ahead, and reread the past week's memos to prepare herself for future meetings. She ate up a little more time by dawdling as she made herself a coffee in the break room, though she regretted it the instant someone spotted her. A chorus of condolences followed her wherever she went, so she bore it with as much grace as she could before scurrying back to her office as soon as it was polite to do so.

 

This was getting silly.

 

Everyone seemed to have decided for her that today was a day of mourning, so perhaps that was what she should be doing. They'd given her the time and space to do it, so -

 

She tried. She gave it her best shot.

 

It was true that she felt... something. That same pressure in her chest, mounting and mounting, that she'd felt this morning when she'd realized the date. Was it grief, though? And how sad should she feel this many years out? And - oh, she had never liked this thought. But it had stayed with her all these years. It had kept her company through the good times and the bad. Especially the bad.

 

She finally looked at it directly, the thought that she had been trying to smother beneath a pile of charitable donations and kind acts. As though she could cancel it out.

 

Was she _glad_ her father was dead?

 

It made her feel ugly inside. She took a breath, not a smooth inhale but a long, uneven, nearly silent sob, and tried to think about it as coldly as she could.

 

Mathematically. That was the way to do it. Mathematically, the world was better off without her father. Come on, Haru. Think of the thousands of workers who were abused under his orders. Think of his Palace, the reflection of his innermost thoughts: the spaceport in the Metaverse, filled with disposable automatons.

 

Think of Sugimura -

 

She couldn't do it. These were ancient hurts, and the part that was so frustrating was that they shouldn't _be_ there anymore. She'd _fixed_ everything. With the other Phantom Thieves, she'd blocked Shido's rise to power and, along with it, obliterated much of the framework of favours and mutual blackmail that had allowed Okumura Foods to become such a twisted monolith in the first place. She couldn't go back in time and undo her father's greed, but she had put the company on a drastically different track. And she hadn't had to see Sugimura's smug, self-important face since she'd graduated high school.

 

But, if she allowed it, the thought of these things still made her lips press into a thin line. Her eyes swam with tears until she willed them away again.

 

She did feel sad. She did feel, if not glad, then relieved that her father was gone. She did feel grief, though not for what she'd lost. It was more like she felt grief for something she hadn't had in the first place.

 

She also felt so very, _very_ angry.

 

Every other year, on this date, she'd stuck it out and finished the day, never mind how little work she'd actually managed to accomplish. But this year felt different, for no reason she could discern. Opening herself up to everything the past had to throw at her had been a mistake, but now that these thoughts were in her head again, she was damned if she was going to let anyone at the office see them on her face.

 

She used her phone's camera as a mirror to fix her makeup and composed herself. Then she texted her driver, set her inbox to bounce back an out of office message for any future mail, and managed to slip past her assistant while he was occupied with a call.

 

Let the old guard gossip, she thought as she settled into the plush backseat. Let them whine about the new generation's work ethic. Her strength, her stamina. The way she looked, the way she spoke. Her age. Her gender. Whichever word they chose, there was always something.

 

Let them talk.

 

She held herself together in the car, just barely, and she was grateful for that. She unlocked the front door, closed it behind her and stumbled on her way inside, only catching herself enough to remain mostly upright. Instead of righting herself and heading further inside, she slumped into where they hung their coats, more of a small alcove than a proper closet, and buried her face into the folds of someone's jacket. A peacoat. Yusuke's, then. She stayed there for a long ten minutes, snuffling quietly in a familiar place with her head obscured and her feet sticking out, until she realized how foolish she must have looked and laughed to herself. She patted everyone's coats back into place and finally removed her own, as well as her shoes, as she wiped at her eyes.

 

She padded through the silent house in her stocking feet. At home before noon on a workday? She felt like she was playing hooky.

 

She'd always been so good, though. Her father had wanted her to be a good student - wanted? Demanded - so she had been. A good daughter for him, and a good future wife for Sugimura. An asset in her father's portfolio.

 

She scrunched up her face and pictured Ryuji as clearly as she could. What would he say in this situation? He'd say she was the head honcho - or boss bitch, a phrase she secretly loved with all her heart - and if she wanted to knock off early, nobody was gonna stop her. And if they did try? Fuck 'em.

 

Sometimes she envied his anger. His old anger, especially, his pure and indignant anger from his high school years, before time had smoothed him out. Before he'd worked hard to smooth himself out. She knew that his anger was something he'd struggled with for years, a constant balancing act between a positive, motivating force and something less controlled, something that he had once told her reminded him of his own father. But if you chose to set the nuance of it aside, his anger seemed so simple from the outside.

 

She couldn't be him, but sometimes she still wished she could tease out a little of his old anger at the injustices of the world and harness it for herself. It wasn't as though she didn't have her own anger. Far from it. But his felt purer. Think of the all staff emails she could write if she had Ryuji and his way with words to help her -

 

She laughed to herself again, standing all alone in the hallway, but stopped abruptly when Yusuke poked his head out of his studio. "Home so early? That's unlike you."

 

She'd forgotten he was home, thrown off by the change to her own schedule, and sank into his arms with a grateful sigh. He was a welcome sight. "Yes. I'm being bad today."

 

She thought he might ask why - she hadn't said a word about what day it was while she'd killed part of the workday texting him - but he didn't. He leaned out of her embrace, and she realized he'd been awkwardly holding his arms out away from her back all along. "If you give me a moment to pack up and wash my hands," he said, gesturing to his paint stained hands with his chin, "I can give you a better hello."

 

So she sat on one of the tall barstools pulled up to the island countertop in the kitchen and waited patiently as he put all of his paints away, and cleaned his brushes, and shelved his wet canvases, _and_ washed his hands thoroughly. All told, it took longer than a moment. Not that she was feeling impatient, of course. Her? Impatient? Never. But when he did reappear, he strode up to her and gave her such a fierce hug that it was as if she'd only just walked in the door, and it was worth the wait.

 

She tucked her face beneath the collar of his shirt, just as she'd done to his peacoat a few minutes ago, and spoke into his chest. "Which one were you working on?"

 

He pulled back again, just far enough to show her one of his hands. Even after having scrubbed his hands clean, there were still shadows of dark paint grimed into the lines of his knuckles and around his nails. Black, blue, grey. "The midnight train piece."

 

The last time they'd asked, he'd given them a little more explanation for the concept behind this painting than he usually did. This one was tied to the depths of Mementos but also to the finality of the last train of the night, he'd said. All options falling away to yes or no, stay or go. Do or die, Ryuji'd suggested, and she'd loved the way Yusuke's eyes had lit up at that. His new piece had a title, or the seed of an idea for one, she guaranteed it.

 

"Mm," she mumbled as she yanked him back to her, clutching him close while still sitting on the tall stool. She felt greedy today. "I do like that one. Are you going to leave Mona in? Hiding under the bench?"

 

Yusuke's paintings were often quite crowded by the time he declared them complete. He shrugged. "If he belongs there." He stooped low and gave her a kiss, as if to punctuate the change of one subject to another. "Are you going to tell me why _you_ are hiding?" he asked, smiling.

 

She supposed she was. Hiding her face and hiding behind small talk, too. She straightened up and finally looked him in the eye. "Today is the eleventh," she said, and there was no look of surprise on his face. He knew why she'd come home from work early. He just wanted to let her know that he knew.

 

She drifted to the living room, and he followed her there in a receptive sort of silence. He was waiting for her to start.

 

"Am I interrupting your work?" It was the emptiest posturing imaginable. Of course she was interrupting his work, and, furthermore, she desperately wanted him to stay. If he went back to his studio and closed the door behind him, she didn't know what she'd do. But her upbringing insisted that she be polite and say the right words.

 

He'd had a very different upbringing. "Yes," he said simply. "But I can afford to miss a few minutes' painting time." Perhaps her face showed her disappointment. "A few hours' painting time," he corrected quickly. He searched her face. "A - a day?"

 

She laughed, her hand over her mouth. She found it hard to give up on that part of her upbringing, too. "If it won't slow you down too much, I'd appreciate the company."

 

He had another show coming up, but this one was a group show; he wouldn't need to carry it on his shoulders singlehandedly like he did his solo shows. And she and Ryuji did try their best to avoid interrupting his studio time, unless Yusuke was long past due for a meal break. She was already well outside her usual habits today, and decided that she would allow herself to be selfish in this way, too.

 

He sat down at the far side of the couch, and instead of sitting beside him, she stretched out full length, her head resting on a pillow in his lap.

 

He understood, as well as any person outside herself could, which was far better than most would. They fell silent, and with him there, the silence felt comfortable. The touch of his hand to her hair, long fingers brushing it up and away from her face, was just distracting enough to keep her thoughts of what she should or should not be feeling at bay. The tension she'd worn in her shoulders and back all morning long finally eased, and she let her eyes fall shut.

 

Then Ryuji came home.

 

"Yusukeee," he sang out, loud and cheerful as he shut the door behind him. "You got time to take a break?" They heard him arrange his shoes, then hang up his jacket. "I got - "

 

He rounded the corner, mouth still open, and she stared back at him from Yusuke's lap, trying not to look as guilty as she felt.

 

Ryuji was holding a paper bag, the sort she recognized very well. She heard Yusuke's belly growl from behind her head, and when hers answered, she doubled up with laughter and rolled off of him.

 

She usually got home long after Ryuji did, given that he kept baker's hours, so she had never seen what their afternoons looked like. Yusuke ate lunch late, it seemed. "Do you only eat cookies for lunch every day?" she asked him, horrified. His figure certainly didn't show it.

 

"Nonsense," he snapped. "I have instant miso soup - "

 

That was _worse._ She was about to admonish him further when Ryuji cut them both off. "I make sure he eats good when I'm here, and I know for a fact you eat this shit for breakfast, Haru, so I don't think you got room to talk," he said, grinning.

 

He dug into the bag and handed them each not a cookie but a perfect croissant, baked only a few hours before, and the two of them made them disappear right there in the living room, never mind where the crumbs might go. Her day had been off right from the start, so it seemed pointless to start standing on ceremony now.

 

Ryuji sank into one of the armchairs, groaning as he got off of his feet. His eyes flicked from Yusuke's face to hers, his chin propped up on the heel of his hand. Finally he spoke up. "Somethin' happen today?"

 

Time to deal with the elephant in the room. "It's the eleventh today."

 

Just as with Yusuke, Ryuji's expression didn't so much as flicker. He'd known too, of course. She wondered if he and Yusuke talked about such things when she wasn't there, to remind each other the way they might about happier occasions, like Ryuji's mother's birthday. "Yeah. I know." He was waiting for more.

 

Now that she'd had a reprieve from her thoughts, she was loath to return to them. Her mood had shifted, but if they were both here and willing to listen, she might as well talk about it. What Ryuji was really asking was why this year was worse than the others, bad enough to make her throw in the towel and go home early. But there was no explanation for it. "I just... "

 

Ryuji had been on his feet all day, and Yusuke still had work to do. But Ryuji got up again and sat at the opposite end of the couch, and Yusuke pulled her back down, and the two of them maneuvered her until she was stretched between the two of them, her head on Yusuke's lap and her legs on Ryuji's. They put their hands on her to give her comfort, her hair and her feet and her legs, and waited in silence for her to speak.

 

She was tired. Even though she'd enforced the eight hour workday and followed it herself nearly religiously, she was simply exhausted. This year really shouldn't have been any worse than the other anniversaries of her father's death. It wasn't even a significant number this year.

 

But keeping up the facade of strength in front of the executives took it out of her. Merely thinking the right _thoughts_ took it out of her. She'd kept herself in check in public today, and she'd managed to only shed a tear or two alone in their coats - just a small leak, nothing to worry about, she'd thought wryly - but a little kindness undid her. "I just... " she repeated, but there was no getting her words past the lump in her throat. She stared up at the underside of Yusuke's jaw as all the tears she'd been holding in flooded out of her, tickling as they ran into her ears.

 

She spoke without thought, letting her words out as they came to her in a way that she never could at work. "I wish I didn't have to see his face," she said viciously. "I wish - I wish that everyone didn't have to _know._ All I've heard all day is how - how sorry everyone is for me, and they either have to all be lying or, or they're wasting their condolences on the wrong _person,_ because - "

 

She cut herself off. She'd been about to say that all the employees had been wasting their condolences on the wrong person because she wasn't sorry her father was dead. Not one bit. But it was a nasty thing to say, and she wasn't a nasty person, and besides, it wasn't true.

 

"It's difficult," Yusuke said.

 

"Yeah," Ryuji said, sounding sympathetic.

 

She lashed out and felt sick as she did. She'd kept all the vile things she'd thought today to herself while she'd been at work, but when she got home, they found an outlet, and it was the people she loved who had to bear it. "You don't know what it's like," she accused, without even knowing which of them she was speaking to. "Your father is _alive._ Your father didn't - " Mercifully, she clapped both hands over her face and closed her mouth before she could do more damage. She'd thought she was done crying, but it seemed she'd been wrong.

 

It wasn't a _contest._ And even if it had been, they were all winners, if you could call them that. Ryuji's father had treated him and his mother in one horrible way, and Yusuke's father had treated him in an entirely different horrible way. And what her father had done to her in his lifetime was another thing to itself. But she knew the way she felt today wasn't unique to her. They'd approached this topic many, many times over the years.

 

"Aw, Haru," Ryuji said, and didn't elaborate. He just rubbed her stockinged feet instead.

 

"We changed Madarame's heart before we met you," Yusuke intoned from above her head, and his voice was more gentle than she deserved. "And he apologized for what he'd done, on national television no less. In a general sort of way. But somehow he never saw fit to make mention of allowing my mother to die. He has never apologized for that. And he has never apologized to me, either. Not once."

 

"What, would you want him to?" Ryuji scoffed, letting her see a little of the anger he was better at hiding these days. "You really want him to look you up one day 'n show up on our doorstep? No fuckin' thanks."

 

One of the first things she and Ryuji had done when their marriage was finalized was to submit the name change paperwork for not only him but his mother, too. Two new Okumuras. Ryuji liked the idea of refusing the Sakamoto name and making it difficult for his father to track them down, and Haru liked the idea of accepting her mother in law, one of her favourite people in the world, into their family in a slightly more concrete way. It all felt very official.

 

Yusuke had wanted to keep his mother's last name, and only one of them could marry Haru, so he was their bachelor, at least until Japan legalized concurrent marriage. Really, it was a distinction on paper only, and of course she loved them both the same, but it did give them a good supply of things to joke about. Leaving her husband for her boyfriend was one, when in reality she was simply crossing the hall. Or Yusuke would joke about stealing her husband out from under her in broad daylight. A more literal Phantom Thief of hearts. Silly things like that.

 

Thinking of nicer times didn't change that she'd been callous just now. "I'm sorry. You do know what it's like. Of course you do. Both of you," she said softly. Their fathers were alive, but it wasn't as though it made a lick of difference in the end.

 

Perhaps that wasn't exactly true. "Nah, s'okay," Ryuji said. "I get what you mean. Everything's cut off, with your dad. He's never gonna get better. He's never gonna... you're never gonna make up."

 

"That avenue can never be explored," Yusuke agreed. "I am not sure, myself, if I would truly want to see Madarame grovelling for my forgiveness. But you will never have that option."

 

Would she want it, were it on the table? A heartfelt apology to her, personally? It made her stomach twist. An apology required forgiveness, or she thought it did, and she wasn't sure if she had it in her to ever grant him that, no matter how many years passed.

 

It wasn't only that. The idea of her father begging her for anything, least of all her forgiveness, was unpleasant, too.

 

It might have shown on her face. Yusuke peered down at her, his face sideways because of how she was laying, and gave her a small, sad smile. "You'd hardly want to see him grovel either, though, would you? Your father."

 

This was where Ryuji differed from them. She knew his feelings on the matter by now. There was a reason it was his anger she envied, not Yusuke's, because Yusuke's was closer to her own. "Yes. I - I mean no. I don't think I would."

 

Sometimes she thought that she and Yusuke’s anger might be more like Ryuji’s - purer, less muddied with regret and a sad, reluctant kind of love - if their fathers had hurt someone else they’d loved, the way Ryuji’s father had treated his mother. Perhaps seeing it right there in front of you, undeniable and outside of your own head, made it easier to categorize. Or maybe it had more to do with the kind of person Ryuji was, and it had nothing to do with the difference between physical hurt and emotional hurt. There was what Madarame had done to Yusuke’s mother, after all. She knew that it was something she would never manage to piece together.

 

Ryuji spoke abruptly from the other end of the couch, out of sight. "You said you don't like to see his face?" he blurted out. "You should just... ban it. Ban that stupid portrait thing they do every year. Nobody needs to see that."

 

"My father's people set that up each year," she said tiredly, her voice still thick with tears. "I am not certain if they intend it as a genuine memorial or a - an insult." She thought again of the vast expanse of yellow carnations.

 

"So? You're the boss. Tell 'em no. Fire 'em."

 

"Fire them all," Yusuke gently mocked. "Why not? No, I have a better idea. Chop them up into a hundred pieces with an axe." Yusuke had some idea of the delicacy of office politics from listening to her vent about Okumura Foods, of course. She was never certain if Ryuji did or if his suggestions to fire the whole building, top to bottom, and start from scratch were serious.

 

But it was a tempting idea. The thought of banning the memorial practice, at least. "I suppose I could," she said, feeling it out as she spoke. "It's been years. It might be time to move on."

 

"If the executives protest, you might consider a permanent memorial of some kind. A very small plaque," Yusuke said.

 

She gasped, immediately and completely enamoured with the idea. "Oh, a _tiny_ plaque," she gushed. "A memorial plaque in - in one of the boardrooms. No, one of the factories."

 

"Heh. Put it in a broom closet," Ryuji suggested.

 

"Somewhere I never, ever have to go," she sighed happily.

 

She wiped the remaining tears from her face, feeling quite a lot better. But she needed to address the whole of it still. "I do feel bad for him, too."

 

They not only understood how she felt, deeply, but they also understood her need to clarify this part of the whole mess. "Yeah. He's... dead," Ryuji said.

 

The sensation of Ryuji and Yusuke turning things over in their minds, searching for something nice to say about her father, was palpable. "He was very... driven?" Yusuke tried.

 

"It's fine," she said. "I suppose I mostly feel that - that in another life, he might have changed, after we took his heart, and if he'd lived, I'd have gotten to know him better. He would have cleaned up the company's act on his own, and we could have... "

 

Ryuji and Yusuke were silent, simply holding her feet and her head in their hands as they waited.

 

She was sick of feeling this way. She felt more than ready to put this tangled ball of emotions back in its drawer until the next time she had to think about it. "Ugh," she complained. "I'm sorry. Thank you, I mean. I don't - I don't know what I mean."

 

"S'fine," Ryuji said, grabbing her feet and swinging her legs off of the couch so he could free his own legs. He lunged toward her and gave her a quick kiss before he straightened up again and headed toward the kitchen. "You hungry? I better make you a good lunch. You never get to have any, usually."

 

Just like that, the mood was changed. She got up so Yusuke could stand, and the three of them sat in the kitchen and chatted, the way they might on an ordinary weekend. She didn't mention which day it was again, and neither did they.


End file.
